Posts tagged with 'ec2'

[UPDATE] The Image ID's have been updated with the latest builds which now include Docker 1.6.2, the latest LXD and of course the Ubuntu Fan driver.

This week, Dustin Kirkland announced the Ubuntu Fan Project. To steal from the description, "The Fan is not a software-defined network, and relies on neither distributed databases nor consensus protocols. Rather, routes are calculated deterministically and traffic carries no additional overhead beyond routine IP tunneling. Canonical engineers have already demonstrated The Fan operating at 5Gpbs between two Docker containers on separate hosts."

My team at Canonical is responsible for the production of these images. Once the official SRU's land, I anticipate that we will publish an official stream over at cloud-images.ubuntu.com. But until then, check back here for images and updates. As always, if you have feedback, please hop into #server on FreeNode or send email.

GCE Images

Images for GCE have been published to the "ubuntu-os-cloud-devel" project.

One of the perennial problems in the Cloud is knowing what is the most current image and where to find it. Some Clouds provide a nice GUI console, an API, or some combination. But what has been missing is a "dashboard" showing Ubuntu across multiple Clouds.

In that light, I am please to announce that we have a new beta Cloud Image Finder. This page shows where official Ubuntu images are available. As with all betas, we have some kinks to work out, like gathering up links for our Cloud Partners (so clicking an Image ID launches an image). I envision that in the future this locator page will be the default landing page for our Cloud Image Page..

The need for this page became painfully apparent yesterday as I was working through the fallout of the Ghost Vulnerability (aka CVE 2015-0235). The Cloud Image team had spent a good amount of time pushing our images to AWS, Azure, GCE, Joyent and then notifying our partners like Brightbox, DreamCompute, CloudSigma and VMware of new builds. I realized that we needed a single place for our users to just look and see where the builds are available. And so I hacked up the EC2 Locator page to display other clouds.

Please note: this new page only shows stable releases. We push a lot of images and did not want to confuse things by showing betas, alphas, dailies or the development builds. Rather, this page will only show images that have been put through the complete QA process and are ready for production work loads.

This new locator page is backed by Simple Streams, which is our machine-formatted data service. Simple Streams provides a way of locating images in uniform way across the cloud. Essentially our new Locator Page is just a viewer of the Simple Stream Data.

We've put together this matrix with a few examples of where we think Traditional Ubuntu (apt-get) and Transactional Ubuntu (snappy) might make sense in your environment. Note that this is, of course, not a comprehensive list.

I've presupposed a few of the questions you might ask, while you're digesting this new landscape...

Q: I'm looking for the smallest possible Ubuntu image that still supports apt-get...

A: You want our Traditional Ubuntu Core. This is often useful in building Docker and LXC containers.

Q: I'm building the next wearable IoT device/drone/robot, and perhaps deploying a fleet of atomically updated micro-services to the cloud...

A: You want Snappy Ubuntu Core.

Q: I want to install the best damn Linux on my laptop, desktop, or personal workstation, with industry best security practices, 30K+ freely available open source packages, freely available, with extensive support for hardware devices and proprietary add-ons...

A: You want the same Ubuntu Desktop that we've been shipping for 10+ years, on time, every time ;-)

Q: I want that same converged, tasteful Ubuntu experience on your personal, smart devices like my Phones and Tablets...

A: You want Ubuntu Touch, which is a very graphical human interface focused expression of Snappy Ubuntu.

A: You want Comfy Ubuntu Server, which is a command line human interface extension of Snappy Ubuntu, with a number of conveniences and amenities (ssh, byobu, manpages, editors, etc.) that won't be typically included in the minimal Snappy Ubuntu Core build. [*Note that the Comfy images will be available very soon]

Many of our Cloud Image users have inquired about the availability of updated Ubuntu Cloud Images in response to the Heartbleed OpenSSL Vulnerability [1]. Ubuntu released update Ubuntu packages for OpenSSL 08 April 2014 [2]. Due to the exceptional circumstances and severity of the Heartbleed OpenSSL bug, Canonical has released new 12.04.4 LTS, 12.10 and 13.10 Cloud Images at [3].

Canonical is working with Amazon to get the Quickstart and the AWS Marketplace links updated. In the meantime, you can find new AMI ID's at [3] and [4]. Also, the snapshot's for Amazon have the volume-create permission granted on the latest images.

If you are running an affected version of OpenSSL on 12.04 LTS, 12.10 or 13.10, you are strongly encouraged to update. For new instances, it is recommended to either use an image with a serial newer than 20140408, or update your OpenSSL package immediately upon launch. Finally, if you need documentation on enabling unattended upgrades, please see [10].

Traditionally, updates for the stable release and long term stable release Cloud Images have been on an ad-hoc basis; reasons for releasing new images were generally restricted to security, critical bugs, and stale images. This ad-hoc update cycle meant that updated images were only released every three months or so, and for older releases, as often as six months.

While quality has always been a concern and top priority, during this cycle, Canonical has worked to vastly improve the QA infrastructure to support our Cloud Images. For example, when a new kernel is released, the daily build for that image is now put through the complete QA process. This change in process has allowed us to identify and automatically evaluate whether or not an image is a good candidate for update release.

As such, we are pleased to announce in the next few weeks, we will be turning on automated updates for Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS, 11.10, 12.04 LTS, and 12.10. This means that approximately every three to four weeks, a new, freshened image will be released. The release cadence will follow the kernel SRU process.

The first updated image to be released under this process was 10.04 LTS[1].

There are a variety of ways to find the released Cloud Images. The two easiest ways are to go the AMI Finder[2] or use http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/<SUITE>/release. For example, http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/lucid/release would bring you to the last AMI's for Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS.

Due to this change, we will discontinuing the email notifications of updated images to the various email lists for updated images. At UDS-R in Copenhagen[3], we discussed email notifications and the decision was reached to discontinue them. Replacing email notification is the RSS feed[4] and release notes (example from 10.04 LTS)[5].

As Cloud Image suites are migrated to automated releases, we will follow up on this announcement.

Finally, for 12.04 LTS and later, this change will introduce lock-step update releases with Windows Azure. As Windows Azure moves towards GA, we have been working to have the same releases for the Ubuntu Server Cloud Images on both EC2 and Windows Azure.

As always, your feedback is most appreciated. Please feel free to follow on either this post or to email concerns direct to me.

For sometime people have been asking me "when will Cloud Images sport a Twitter account?" Well, wait no longer, because the Ubuntu Cloud Image Builder now has a Twitter Account.

The Cloud Image process will now Tweet when a new image is build and published -- dailies, new release updates and new versions being releases. For right we're only Tweeting EC2 information, but once Windows Azure goes GA, we'll start Tweeting that too.

So in the meantime, you can follow our faithful Cloud Builder as it tweets merrily its build progress at @UbuCloudImages. But I'll have to warn you, the Cloud Builder won't response to tweets, so we're not snubbing you if there is no response.

One of the highlights of going to re:invent in Las Vegas in November was meeting our users. In general, I really like talking to the users of the Ubuntu Cloud Images. I had heard a little buzz around the Obama campaign and their use of the cloud, so, you can image how happy I was to find out that Ubuntu was one of the ingredients in their secret sauce.

This picture is the fine folks of Ubuntu, Amazon and the Obama and Democratic National Committee. We had a great time just chatting, and of course talking about Ubuntu.